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It's a staggering statistic: one in four American teenagers drops out
of school before graduation, a rate that rises to one in three among
black and Hispanic students. But there's no federal system keeping
track of the more than 7,000 American teenagers who drop out of school
each day.

That appears to be changing. On Oct. 28, Education
Secretary Margaret Spellings issued new rules that will force states to
adopt a common system to monitor dropouts. Critics of No Child Left
Behind have long accused the federal legislation not only of leading
more schools to teach to the test, but of letting  or perhaps even
encouraging  struggling students to drop out before they can lower
average test scores. But Spellings is trying to address this problem
with new regulations that will set a uniform graduation rate so that a
high school's annual progress will now be measured both by how students
perform on standardized tests and by how many of them graduate within
four years.

Schools that do not improve their graduation rates
will face consequences, such as having to pay for tutoring or replace
principals. "For too long, we've allowed this crisis to be hidden and
obscured," Spellings said in her announcement, made nearly seven years
after No Child Left Behind was signed into law. "Where graduation rates
are low, we must take aggressive action."

When No Child Left
Behind was originally debated by legislators in 2001, states were given
a break on graduation rates to help ease the bill's passage. In the
years since, Democrats have argued that because of a lack of funding,
some states have no choice but to set the bar low, since it's the only
way they can be considered successful.

The Bush Administration,
however, has now been prompted to action by a series of studies that
have shown the severity of the country's dropout crisis. The U.S. is
the only industrialized nation in the world where children are now less likely to receive a high school diploma than
their parents were, according to an Oct. 23 report by the Education Trust, a
children's advocacy group based in Washington. At the same time,
two-thirds of new jobs in the U.S. require at minimum a college degree.
That education gap could lead to devastating outcomes if a lack of
skilled workers leads to more industries heading overseas and more
Americans facing poverty and crime-ridden streets. "We are letting
every other country surpass us in educating children," says Marguerite
Kondracke, president and CEO of America's Promise Alliance, a nonprofit
dedicated to improving education. "It's a risk not only to our economy,
but our national security as well."

Once enacted in 2012, the
new rules should give officials a much more accurate picture of just
how bad the dropout epidemic is. Although high schools are currently
required to meet graduation targets each year, states have been setting
the bar for improvement, a system that has led to a lot of variation
across the country. The Education Trust report found that in half of
states, even the tiniest bit of progress was deemed sufficient. In a
few states, simply not doing worse than the previous year was good
enough. "A 50% graduation rate holding steady should not be viewed as
progress by anyone," says Daria Hall, assistant director for K-12
policy development at the Education Trust. "We obviously need more
reliable and meaningful statistics."

That's what Spellings and
the Department of Education now aim to provide. Up until now, there was
little the federal government could do to force schools to set higher
standards. In fact, in 2005, all 50 states agreed to enact a uniform
graduation rate, but only 16 eventually did. Now officials will require
states to spell out how they will implement key elements of the federal
law, formal plans that the Department of Education must approve. And
officials are hoping more scrutiny will push schools to do better when
it comes to dropouts. Not only will data be more consistent, it will
also be made public, allowing parents and educators for the first time
to make side-by-side comparisons of different schools as well as
districts. Results can also be broken down by race and income level.
Without such information, "we cannot compare Duluth to Denver," says
Bob Balfanz, an education researcher at Johns Hopkins University.

But the new
rules will go one step further than that. Not only will they identify
schools that need support to improve, but they will help highlight
reforms that are actually working. Take, for example, efforts in
Georgia, where a graduation coach is assigned to each high school to
ensure students stay on track. The program is only a few years old, but
the state's graduation rate appears to be rising. The new call for
federal data will help other states determine whether a program like
Georgia's would be a good use of their resources. Plus, more accurate
information may ultimately make the dropout problem "seem more
manageable," Kondracke says. "We can't move forward until we can
measure where we are now."